Partnerships combine separate companies’ niche expertise, market experience and technological know-how to bring forth innovative and cutting-edge products. However, those tie-ins are often merely software integrations with little or no co-engineering effort.

Elasticsearch B.V. and Google Cloud are bucking that trend by fostering a robust AI partnership beyond surface-level alignment, according to Alyssa Fitzpatrick (pictured), global vice president of partner sales at Elastic.

“Just to start straight out of the gates, we won two Partner of The Year awards, which was very exciting for us; we were thrilled not just to win but to win twice,” she said. “Both in the AI category — one is for data management in AI, and the other is the Artificial Intelligence Partner of The Year for tooling. It just underscores not only our commitment, but our shared commitment with Google in the AI space, so really couldn’t be more delighted about that.”

Fitzpatrick spoke with theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson at Google Cloud Next, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Google Cloud and Elastic as proof that synergistic innovation is as important as the underlying technology in an AI partnership. (* Disclosure below.)

Deep integrations, co-engineering and co-marketing underpin the AI partnership

Beyond accolades, Elastic took the opportunity to announce major technical integrations with Google. Chief among them was the native embedding of Elastic’s vector database into Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform. This enables faster, more seamless AI-driven search and analytics experiences, serving as a powerful foundation for developers building next-gen applications, according to Fitzpatrick.

“[Number] one is the integration of our Elasticsearch vector database as a native grounding engine in Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform,” she said. “That’s a whole mouthful of words, but it just basically means that we are now a native vector database within their platform, which enables the AI story.”

Additionally, Elastic rolled out general availability of its observability integration with Vertex AI, expanding large language model capabilities across the cloud ecosystem. The company also reported significant performance boosts for Elasticsearch on Google’s Axiom processors, further enhancing compute efficiency — a key metric in today’s AI-intensive workloads.

“It’s all very tied to Google, our work with Google, our innovation with Google and how we deepen our partnership with them, not only in how we’re going to market, but specifically around our integration around AI,” Fitzpatrick added.

Beneath the surface, the Elastic-Google Cloud AI partnership is built on monthly and quarterly business reviews, co-engineering roadmaps and strategic marketing efforts. Their top executives — including Elastic’s CEO and chief product officer — routinely engage with Google counterparts to align on innovation, execution and go-to-market strategies, according to Fitzpatrick.

“As Google releases their roadmaps and we release ours, we always have innovation strategy sessions to make sure that we’re lockstep together as we’re developing,” she said. “We are also lockstep together in marketing, so that as we are releasing some of this incredible technology together, we have the chance to amplify that to the market.”

Another dynamic element to the partnership is Elastic’s commitment to using customer feedback as a source of product innovation. The process is iterative, where the company’s roadmap adapts rapidly based on both customer demand and Google’s evolving toolsets.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud Next:

(* Disclosure: Elasticsearch B.V. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Elastic nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE